Some topics I want to do some research on:
– take conscious control of the unconscious
– behaviour change. Find out what I want to change. Then do it.
Things to research : self improvement
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Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Extra head rotation
The head of the Sigma EF-500 DG Super rotates 180degrees if rotated to the left (photographer’s view) but only 90deg to the right.
I always found that limiting, so since I had the guts spilled on my table trying to figure out the sync port, I decided to modify the head rotation of the flash at the same time.
What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit.
Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Sync port – part 2
In part one I described how I tapped into the electronics of my Sigma EF-500 DG Super to provide me with an access point to trigger the flash from a sync port.
In this post I will discuss how I added the actual sync port: physical mounting, and lessons learned.
What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.
WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit. This hack involves a little soldering.
Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Sync port – part 1
Recently I’ve been starting to learn more about flash photography compliments of The Strobist.
Then I bought a set of cheap ebay wireless flash triggers to alow me to trigger the flash remotely, but with the Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash, that was not possible.
UPDATE: Recently purchased a set set of Yongnuo RF- 602 2.4 Ghz wireless triggers from ebay (they’re quite cheap), and they work flawlessly with the Sigma flash, without any modifications. If you want a sync port, try the method below, but if all you want is to trigger the Sigma flash, buying a set of the RF-602 triggers is by far the simplest way of doing it.
Most other flashes out there can easily be triggered by shorting out the two main terminals on the hot-show. But not on this sigma. So I had to find another way to trigger the flash manually, which led to the decision to hack my flash to get a sync port.
What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.
WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit. This hack involves a little soldering.
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Interesing WiFi related articles
XEN and network adaptor setup
I am trying to configure pfSense as a XEN VM, and the main difficulty is getting the network adapters to work properly.
I have successfully ran pfSense as a VM in OpenSuSE 10.3, and I am documenting this to make life easier for next time.
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Firewall setup for home
I think I’ve hit upon the ideal (for me) setup of the firewall.
The internet connection will look something like this:
Internet –> Cable Modem –> pfsense router (as VM) –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN
The main reason for this setup is redundancy. If the VM dies, or the VM server goes down, I can very quickly go to this alternate setup:
Internet –> Cable Modem –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN
by just plugging the cable modem in to the dlink router instead of pfsense software firewall.
The router will take case of assigning IP addresses, so that feature needs to be disabled in pfsense (so there’s no fighting)
With this setup I can have control of the data that goes out on the net (shape it anyway I want with pfsense) and still have the flexibility to remove it from the chain, without making ANY setup changes to keep the network connectivity going (Very important, in order to keep a high WAF)
Onsenhomes.com email problems
Well I don’t know what the problems are, with the email again, but I am going to move all the mail forwarding, and DNS stuff to NameCheap (current registrar).
The current host (pwrhost.com) is not doing any more web hosting, so there is really nothing tying me down to them anymore. (at least for that domain)
On the Namecheap control panel, all I will be doing is
– “Transfer DNS back to us” which will allow mw to change the DN S settings directly from the registrar site
– change the A record for the www prefix to 198.145.0.46
– setup the email forwarding as it used to be.
The old Name Servers were NS1.PWRHOST.COM and NS2.PWRHOST.COM
Booksmart in Linux
Followed the instructions on Leuc’s site to get version Booksmart 1.9.8 working on linux.
Got the patch.
First try was using the mac dmg file. Extracted the contents, and tried running the command that Leuc has on the site. but no luck. Then I read about the problems with 64bit java.
Meanwhile I also install the Win version on a win machine and copy the lib and resources folders, hoping that things would work. No luck again.
So after some fiddling with installing only the 32bit versions of java on a 64bit OpenSuse 11.0 machine, I got it working. Shocking! I know. I was impressed. That just means I gotta get off my ass and make the Morocco book. And the baby book.
Some notes:
When changing to 32bit version of Java 1.6, it seems to install java 1.5 also. But it installs the 64 bit version, so that then needs to be told to install the 32bit version, which in turn brings up some other dependancies. I didn’t bother with those dependancies.
Looking for ideas for a wedding photography website
– Free web design templates found here at www.oswd.com
– Photography gallery that doesn’t use flash HERE
– Site I like the look of for a wedding photography site. HERE
– Also interesting. How to make a gallery using scriptaculous. HERE
– A photographer’s website that does more then just weddings. HERE
– Decided to use SmoothGallery 2.0 for my online photograhy site . Details can be found HERE
I will use it in conjuntion with the “How to make your own gallery” php script to allow for dynamic editing (adding/deleting) of images.
– How to integrate the SmoothGallery 2.0 into a WordPress blog (will need this for my photo blog) HERE
Looking for ideas for wedding websites. Looking at this site of Karri North, found some interesting photos. Not all photos are razor sharp. I guess it’s the emotion captured that’s more important then focus?. Not all photos are buttery smooth (lots of shots with plenty of grain/noise).
Also, at first I didn’t quite like the fact that the gallery spanned a new full screen window, but after viewing 20-40 images, the large images really work.